Theatre review: Anna Karenina

WHEN Anna Karenina was first published in the 1870s, it was dismissed by some as "a trifling romance"; and Tolstoy's great study of love certainly features familiar plot-lines, notably the central doomed affair between the married Anna, and army officer, Vronsky.

What Tolstoy makes of this familiar material, though, is something quite transcendent in its beauty and wisdom, and its intense sense of the shared human yearning for love. Now, Dundee Rep has revived Jo Clifford's beautiful 2005 stage version; and although Jemima Levick's production is not flawless, it remains an almost irresistible study of the tension between the deep inner longing for joy and fulfilment, and the everyday demands of society.

Instead of taking Clifford's sequence of short scenes and whipping them into a sweeping spectacle, Levick instead spreads them out for inspection, across the width of a vast, austere wooden set by Alex Lowde. The actors often seem far away, the pace sometimes sluggish; and the casting as Vronsky of the Rep's youngest actor – a light-voiced boy sent to play the part of a 28-year-old warrior aristocrat – slightly unbalances the central relationship.

In the end, though, it's hard to resist the heartfelt integrity of Emily Winter's Anna, a passionate woman who finds to her despair that her great love cannot survive her social death. Robert Paterson is superb as the old rogue Oblonsky, whose serial betrayal of his long-suffering wife provides a second strand to the plot. And a brilliant Kevin Lennon and Helen Darbyshire, as his young friends Levin and Katy, seem like a template for millions of young couples today; convinced true love will resolve all their problems, and shocked to find instead that marriage and parenthood only bring a whole new set of questions, even tougher and more frightening than those that went before.